Gestalt Therapy

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the Gestalt therapy that emerged from a multitude of philosophical, theoretical, scientific and cultural roots. The paper explains that as a product of the early twentieth century, it would be impossible to divorce the evolution of Gestalt therapy from Marxism or existentialism and indeed the theories of Gestalt therapy in part derive from those philosophies. Moreover, the paper claims that the Gestalt therapy at least in part originated through a therapeutic application of the perception principles of Gestalt psychology. The paper examines the tenuous and controversial relationship between Gestalt therapy and Gestalt psychology.

From the Paper:

"The key founders of Gestalt therapy were Fritz Perls, Laura Perls, and Paul Goodman. Their theories first become codified in the 1940s and 1950s, decades after the publication of key Gestalt psychological works like Wertheimer's 1933 Productive Thinking, and Kolher's 1929 book Gestalt Psychology. Perhaps the main contribution of Gestalt psychology on Gestalt therapy were the "gestalt laws," including the law of pragnanz, the law of closure, the law of similarity, and the law of proximity. Although these laws were used by Gestalt psychologists to describe mostly perceptual phenomenon, they can be easily extended to offer descriptions of human mental and cognitive processes. For example, the law of pragnanz (literally the "law of pregnancy") implies that the individual will gravitate toward experiencing "as good a gestalt as possible," (Boeree 2000). In other words, the human being naturally seeks wholeness in his or her visual perceptions. Applied to Gestalt therapy, the law of pragnanz would imply that the human being naturally seeks wholeness in his or her experiences of reality, and in his or her relationships. One of the keys to psychological healing is the achievement of wholeness, or gestalt."

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